Thank you to board members past and present, friends, and supporters who joined us to toast the New Year in San Antonio! Dear Hill Country Neighbors, It is a privilege to serve as the new Board President of the Hill Country Alliance (HCA) and to work with my fellow board members on the common commitment of preserving open... Read more

Pipeline companies in Texas and other states have long had the power to take land under the eminent domain principle that projects to transport energy to heat homes, generate electricity and produce fuels are in the public interest. But what if the public is in Europe, South America or Asia? As natural gas and crude oil produced in... Read more

If you want to cook up a battle over private property rights in Texas, here’s the recipe: Take a handful of sprawling cities and growing populations that are expanding into once-rural areas, add a booming oil and gas industry with a desperate need for new pipelines to move record-high volumes of hydrocarbons, and sprinkle in the new electric... Read more

Citing Austin’s aggressive environmental goals, which include making municipal operations carbon neutral by 2020, Bloomberg Philanthropies on Friday announced that the Texas capital has won a national climate change challenge. The honor means Austin will join a two-year accelerator program that will give the city access to as much as $2.5 million in technical assistance and support. Austin... Read more

As the federal shutdown—which entered Day 20 on Thursday—continues, self-appointed cleanup crews have been organized across the state as well as the nation to help care for parks that have remained open, albeit with little in the way of services. Some, like Viverette and the collection of Terlingua residents and businesses on the edge of Big Bend National... Read more

As urbanization and climate change are impacting aquifers across the country, officials and municipalities are turning to new technologies to meet water demands. For many entities, investing in Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) systems might be the way to go. ASR, which was first tested and experimented in the 1990s, calls for the pumping of groundwater during periods of... Read more

After Hurricane Harvey inundated the Houston area with rain, scores of homeowners learned too late that their properties were designed to flood. Senate Bill 339 would require such disclosures. It would also force notice of whether a home has previously flooded. State Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, on Friday filed legislation that would require sellers of residential properties to... Read more

As men leave animal agriculture for less gritty work, more ranches are being led by women — with new ideas about technology, ecology and the land. Hundreds of years before John Wayne and Gary Cooper gave us a Hollywood version of the American West, with men as the brute, weather-beaten stewards of the land, female ranchers roamed the frontier.... Read more

“The mission of the Hill Country Alliance is to bring together an ever-expanding alliance of groups throughout a multi-county region of Central Texas with the long-term objective of preserving open spaces, water supply, water quality and the unique character of the Texas Hill Country.” Learn More About HCA

"All my life I have drawn sustenance from the rivers and from the hills of my native state... I want no less for all the children of America than what I was privileged to have as a boy."-Lyndon B. Johnson